I like the medium and the subject, people having fun and interacting, making mistakes.

The Date 12×9″

Also, my studio is rented out. I can’t paint in oil on canvas or I will make a big mess with two little children and two big dogs.

So for now, my late night kitchen table is my studio.

If I make an artwork with images of my children and post it on the internet, do I face the same dangers as posting photos of them?

Does that change when it is a drawing?

“Hope for the Future” 7×7” 2012

A painting?

Copyright Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Mike Bruce
‘The Mothers,’ by Jenny Saville and inspired by her own motherhood, at her new show

I chose to orange the top because otherwise it was boring. Like wanting to die my hair, or wear a fashion item that I know will go out of style in a year, I wanted this painting to have a little more back bone than the typical waterscape.

To get the accuracy in the pier sketch above, the correct perspective and spacing and such, I used my projector as a light box and traced the photo. Is this cheating?

Kind of.

But it is also a contemporary tilt that affects the way the final image looks. Photography in painting creates very different images from non-photographic or drawn images.

The water below was all me; sketched in with loose remembering of that cold evening by the side of the river.

I wanted something about the viewer and viewed: knowledge and innocence, old and young, knowing and not knowing.

This is all complex lines and fine control of the pencil and mark making, knowing the undulations and pen control

And pencil is the most rudimentary of drawing mediums.

And this is a page torn out of the pad he was scribbling on.

The Bridges of Glendale 36x48x2 2010

I painted this.

Then I sold it, which is great. But I missed it.

I liked it as an object to hang in my house. The colors seemed to help tie together all the rooms I hung it in. I like the message, that even freeways and municipal water management systems have their beauty. I liked hanging a portrait of my neighborhood.

So I painted it again. Is that self plagiarism? Is there such a thing as self-plagiarism or is that simply self-improvement? Is it okay?

The Freeways of Glendale 24×36 2011

To get the accuracy in the pier sketch below, the correct perspective and spacing and such, I used my projector as a light box and traced the photo. Is this cheating?

Kind of.

But it is also a contemporary tilt that affects the way the final image looks. Photography in painting creates very different images from non-photographic, or drawn images.

There are great, memorable and important paintings made with the use of the camera. The whole Pop Art Photorealism movement of the 1960’s was based on this premise.

At New Blood Art there a bunch of paintings like that, which owe a debt to photographs. Like this one by Tina Gibbard or the work by KT

or more famously, Ralph Goings or Richard Estes from the pop art movement.

A few days after tracing the pier from a photograph and painting the projected image onto the canvas, I was struck by the composition of my studio. I sketched it with the drawing board perched on my knee.

In my mind I was tracing the outlines of the various objects on the table. It was like my mind had been trained to copy outlines from all the previous tracing. It is ironic that the studio sketch above shows the projector as it was really drawn from life.

Inevitably, one makes mistakes when freehand drawing. For example, the scale of the paint brushes in the foreground got a little too large to fit into the space on the paper where the foreground is supposed to go. It is the skill of the drawer to adjust the image to accommodate for those mistakes.

I contend that it is those mistakes that make an artwork uniquely human. It is the mistakes in the image that makes the magic: that over exaggerated curve in the painting of a woman’s neck that really speaks out to us about her state of mind.

The mistakes make the rhyme of creative bent. The drawer’s inaccuracies take the visage away from just image and turns into a signpost for your heart; that turns the image away from the original source and into Art.

In this painting the cross of the power cable to mimics the Christian Cross. The new power over people is in electricity and our digital footprint rather than the control religion used to have over our lives.

I think I will make it bigger as this one is only 8x10inches. I like the dusky handling, the ‘about to rain’ highlights, the slight dystopian feel…

It is the role of artists to show us beauty in our own age. Artists make our world of cities and offices, our morning traffic jams and nightlife; our familiar grind; and show us how to see it as beautiful and worthy.

My studio backs onto Elysian Park. The occasional ‘painters block’ affords me long walks up in its back trails. High above the busy i5 are a million commuting SUVs and heavy goods vehicles. I stare out at the flowing freeway, the boxed in and tamed river, the sinewy lines of the railway and little far away houses like plastic monopoly hotels.

Amy Bernays The Bridges of Glendale 36”x48”

I love the lines of freeway bridges and high-rise buildings. Unlike the decorative sensibilities of the past, the Baroque adornment of buildings, its decorative appliqué, our age is pragmatic, simple and austere.

The Bridges of Glendale is my love song to the city. It is my poem to the pragmatism of municipality. Its muted pallet and concentration on line and shape are aimed at pointing out the beauty of functional design.

Imagine a great and grand painting of a broken down tractor-trailer at a truck stop. Not exactly the subject that first comes to mind when you think of famous landscape paintings of the 19th Century. But that would be the 21st century equivalent of the now bastion of establishment in landscape painting, Constable’s The Hay Wain.

John Constable The Hay Wain 51”x72” 1821 (The National Gallery)

It is memories of paintings of our modern world that can remind us how to find beauty in a fleeting taxi, a passing gesture, or indeed a broken down truck on the interstate.

Amy Bernays, The Language of Long Lingering Looks 28”x12”

In my painting, The Language of Long Lingering Looks, I am like a wildlife photographer crouching in the reads of a watering hole in Africa catching the twitches of nervous gazelle. I watch the bar goers flirt and rebuff, I sketch the innuendo and bravado of our nightlife. I am translator to line of the great unsaid, the mating habits of the young and trendy.

Contemporary artists live among us, they eat in our restaurants, walk our streets, soak up the same sun their on vacation, but they see our live as worthy of Art. They teach us how to see our world as the amazing place it is. Contemporary artists are our ambassadors to the future.

I keep looking at patterns, the stripes, the leaves on the lawn, the blue of the fig tree, the hash of the fence.

Does it still count as my art if I painted the fence and not the image?